This is what we had installed back in 2019 and don't regret it at all. They put 714 feet worth of pipe under the ground (two bore holes) which runs through the foundation to the heat pump. When its 100 we have no problem keeping the house around 70 and when its -10 we keep the house around 68 without issue. Definitely don't miss oil and natural gas.

I've been remote for around 8 years now with occasional travel to an office. I wouldn't trade it for anything other than a massive increase in salary. Not that it matters since my nearest office is 5 hours away in a different country.

The company I work for (software, about 500 employees) is taking an "if you want to" approach. Offices are opening, they'd like to see people but no plan to force people back. Considering that over the last 8 years we migrated heavily from a must be in office policy to almost 50% remote (including vps) it makes sense. I want to say maybe 5 years ago the company did surveys at each branch about satisfaction. Most offices ranged from 55% to 65% satisfied. They had remote do this I guess to not have us left out but the results ended up being something like 92% of remote employees were satisfied.

Kids aren't stupid. If it shuts down every day from 12 - 3 they aren't going to consider it magic.

It absolutely is the case in most civilized states. Parent poster is being overly dramatic.

Username checks out.

Also... agreed although I'm not at risk of going back to an office being that the nearest one is 5 hours away and in a different country.

I'm in NY and schools have been open although with various configurations depending on the school and local cases. My youngest has been in school every day since September with only two closings due to cases. My oldest has been full remote but could go in a hybrid option if we wanted.

Maybe I've played too much KSP but with the amount of hardware spread out over the solar system why do we not have a large dish in Earth orbit to act as a relay to the ground?

MoviePass changes it's business model faster than new the Javascript community mints new frameworks. It's exhausting. Last Tuesday it was $9.95 a month and you can see three movies every full moon plus you get SoundCloud for free on weekends and next week it'll be $15 a month and twice a week someone will break into your home, tie you to your couch, and force you to watch John Travolta's latest space opera, and they will also bill you for a potion of the food in your fridge.

I get whiplash trying to keep up with their constant quest to find a profitable business model, and somehow it still hasn't occurred to them that "bring in more money than you spend" is the only viable solution.

The movie theaters are worried about the movie going experience becoming devalued in the minds of customers.

A couple of years ago, if you and a friend went to the movies, it cost $20 for the tickets. Now, with movie pass, it costs $0 for the tickets. People are starting to think that "going to the movies" is more or less free.

but movie pass is going to fail. There is simply no way for them to be profitable. So some day in the not-too-distant future, movies are going to start costing $20 again. But if people have been conditioned to think that movies are free, there is going to be a lot of resistance to suddenly paying $20 again, and attendance will drop as a result.

Seems like they're trying to play games to control speech worldwide.

There's no "seems like"; that is explicitly what the Austrian court ruled. "We don't like this, therefore it is illegal around the world."

He spams his books with hundreds of fake positive reviews, drowning out the honest, negative reviews. "Taking he average" doesn't work, because there's so little signal compared to all the noise.

I'm proposing my own new legislation, the No Exploitation of 9/11 Act. According to this act, any politician who tries to justify their legislation by invoking the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001 will be immediately removed from, and forbidden from ever again holding, any public office. Goddamned vultures.

Bullshit. The Paris attackers did not use encrypted communications.

Was this an intelligence failure? Possibly. Was it an intelligence failure due to a lack of backdoors and/or laws against cryptography? Absolutely not.

Reservoirs often have fish and in some cases quite large ones since people aren't allowed to fish on them unless they have special permits.

**: As an unreferenced footnote, fixed devices such as Chromecast should always have a hardwired option. Every other*** fixed device on my network is hard-wired; why should the Chromecast not be? I've never carried the Chromecast between TVs, although it's easy enough to do so.

We move ours all the time and don't have ethernet in most rooms of the house. I'd rather ethernet be optional to keep the footprint smaller.